SiliconBeat

When thinking about biotech in the Bay Area, images of Mission Bay in S.F., or Oyster Point in South City, or even that stretch of I-80 around Emeryville come to mind. But not San Jose.

Well, a press release put out by the San Jose Redevelopment Authority Tuesday — which has spent about $19 million seeding business incubator programs, including one called the San Jose BioCenter — put an end to our ignorance.

“The bioscience sector in San Jose experienced a year-to-year growth rate of approximately
28 percent from 2002 to 2008,” based on the number of bioscience businesses located within
the city limits, according to the agency. That’s a growth rate that “outpaces the Bay Area
and the U.S. by a healthy margin,” according to a preliminary report put out by the
Redevelopment Authority.

During the first quarter of 2008, venture capitalists invested in 40 companies in San
Jose, giving out some $436.5 million, which, by our calculations, represented three out of every
four dollars invested in Bay Area biotech ventures, and nearly one out of every five dollars invested
nationwide, according to the PricewaterhouseCoopers/National Venture Capital Association
MoneyTree Report from data provided by Thomson Reuters.

A strong driver of this growth, the authority claims, has been the San Jose BioCenter, the cornerstone for a life science cluster founded in 2004. Situated in San Jose’s Edenvale Technology Park, the center currently has 22 tenant companies and 10 affiliate companies, and has created more than 150 jobs. Among them, the companies have raised more than $700 million in growth capital, according to the authority.

And the hunt is on for more companies, it would seem. We sent an e-mail to Steven Brewster, the
Redevelopment Authority contact listed on the press release, because we had some questions. We got a ping back with an automatically generated reply that he’s out of the office until next week because he’s attending the International Biotech Convention in San Diego.

So when will that convention be held here?